i’ve made quite a few posts on #blackfishing and there’s always those handful of people who don’t think it’s a big deal or say i should mind my business when it comes to how people dress, etc. i wish it wasn’t a big deal, i wish i could ignore it but a lot of these people make it pretty hard. blackfishing has repercussions that most don’t even realize are harmful. this comment is one of them. have you ever felt that you had to overcompensate? have you ever felt that you couldn’t wear a hairstyle or clothing because you were afraid of what people would say?
#mixedpeople, especially #mixedwomen, are forced to water ourselves down in so many ways. we can’t be ourselves, our authentic selves, talk about it or even celebrate it.
we’re accused of blackfishing AND starting the “trend”. @nicoleocran said it best in a article about blackfishing and #mixedfishing in @metro.co.uk: “Blackfishing in particular fuels the stereotype that mixed people are actively trying to deceive people. It perpetuates the “pick me” stereotype – when it is white people who are afforded the opportunity to take on and off this cosplay as they so choose. This is the mixed person’s reality. We just want the opportunity to discuss the fluidity of identity without being mocked, ridiculed or excluded, but music videos like #JesyNelson’s or celebrities making billions of dollars in the beauty industry like #KylieJenner, make it easy entertainment fodder.”
What are your thoughts on this? And please please please be kind to each other in the comments! #mixedgirlproblems
I don’t want to spend too much time on this “hot” topic. So here are my thoughts on the mixed fishing phenomena…
1. I’ve noticed that average looking non-richly melanated women, who dont meet the conventional beauty standards i.e. slim, blonde and white, tend to partake in mixed-fishing shenanigans. In an attempt to appear more “desirable”, they use cosmetics, non-invasive/invasive surgery to alter their natural average features with hopes of looking : racially ambiguous, exotic, or of mixed heritage… because in “urban” culture such looks are considered beautiful.
2. If you are blessed to be an offspring of two Black parents, you shouldn’t feel offended or disappointed by this nonsense, because these white women aren’t contributing to our dehumanisation or erasure. If anything, their actions are negatively impacting mixed women.
3. Accordingly, Black women I urge you to put down your capes, and let mixed women and the ignorant self hating black men (who worship white/mixed women) fight this battle…it isn’t any of our beautiful black business.
Oh, no. This has an actual name: “Blackfishing”. Ariana Grande has only made it more acceptable to do it, but it’s been around for a long time now. Google it, please learn about it, and listen to the Black women who have been calling this out for years.
Here’s a (very) short rundown video for you:
Not only does the endemic culture of Blackfishing create an unfair supply/demand on beauty and cosmetic products created and marketed for POC, but it’s also little more than a “beautified” version of returning to the late- and post-Antebellum era that strongly featured the fetishization of “mulatto” children and later the disturbing obsession with individuals known as “octaroons”.
So, real quick digression: Juneteenth is an important holiday that wins out hands-down against any American 4th of July or other history-honoring holiday in the US. For those who don’t know what “Juneteenth” is, it’s become the name for the exact date of the anniversary of THE LAST SLAVES to be freed after the Civil War and the Emancipation proclamation. It took over a decade before the last slave was freed by the United States and bestowed with what few rights the nation was willing to give, which is where we get back into the subject of “Octaroons”.
In the earliest decades after the Emancipation Proclamation (just don’t read the fine print on the 13th Amendment), predominantly black Americans were still not allowed the full rights that, at the time, should’ve been made available to every man, woman, and child in the nation (still unequal since we’re still fighting over that one, but the point was nevertheless an important one to push). This included the right to marry interracially… kind of. It was illegal for a white man to marry a black woman, and illegal for a black man to even touch a white woman in certain states and counties. That is, until the icky “blackness” or “negro blood” (i’msorryi’msorryi’msorry for such language) had been “watered down” by eight generations of white descendants following a black or mulatto ancestor, hence “Octaroons” = “Eight white ancestors and one black one for flair”, but could be used as a general umbrella term for black Americans with a substantial amount of white ancestry, or that had “white features” enough to attract the attention of the wealthy enough pervert looking to steal the humanity from someone whose only crime was possession of melanin. Once a person was born with more than 8 degrees of separation from being considered a completely black individual, they became “acceptable” and accessible, and a market for fetishization quickly followed.
“Octaroon” women especially were prized as prostitutes, trafficked slaves, escorts, and indentured mistresses or wives. They were still not protected by the same degree of White Constitutional Protection because they still had a provable ancestry rooted in POC ancestors, which rendered them more vulnerable to predation than their all-white counterparts.
“Octaroon” women were commonly trafficked and valued for their “exotic” facial features and tantalizingly-darker-than-lily-white complexions, particularly around Georgia and Louisiana, and countless suffered inhumane treatment for their entire lives for being born within acceptable degrees of whiteness to be worthy of white attention, with just enough unacceptable amounts of blackness to make it culturally acceptable to continue treating them as chattel and literally robbing babies from the arms of their mothers.
To my makeup-wearing followers, please stop with these trends. Just because it hasn’t been flat-out branded as blackface doesn’t make it acceptable to racially bend your outward identity in order to appear like a more exotic mélange of not-whiteness to add to your allure online, and you’re adding to the unreasonable beauty standards and expectations real mixed-race and POC makeup-wearers face on a daily basis with or without cosmetics. People of color are beautiful in ways “white beauty” simply isn’t, and that doesn’t give white people the right to invade and colonialize that. Stop trying to gentrify and steal that from them, too. If you’re not happy with the person you see in the mirror, you should go to therapy, not Sephora.
